Heat Rises, Water Seeks Low

I’ve been saying for quite a while now that there is nothing like the death of your parents to bring home the idea of your own mortality. But now I have to rephrase that to “there is nothing like your own mortality to bring home your own mortality”, or I should say “nothing like getting a somewhat-sorta-maybe-but-probably-not-quite-yet death sentence”. However, let me quickly add for those who might happen to worry, what Mark Twain said, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” And I really do feel quite fine today in a way that I think is actually quite realistic.

So, what’s this all about? For those who just want the Cliff Notes, simply glance at this entry’s tags. But for those who’d like to read the story (especially those who may be of advanced age), which may or may not be interesting and telling, please read on.

“It all began,” I think, with a prayer, very sincerely asked and very truly wanting an answer, which was last Monday night. I had gotten all cozy under my covers and surrounded by several comforting pillows, when I called on God, Jesus, my Higher Self, or anyOne along those lines who would provide me with an answer. My question was on the order of “What is really wrong with me, why can’t I get anything done any more, why do I have no energy, why no matter what I eat, or how much, do I feel constantly ravenous, why do I have very little hope that anything will get better or why do I believe that I can’t do anything about my problems, please let me know, perhaps in a dream, but in whatever other way You know is best. Amen.”

Well, I did end up with a peculiar little dream, something I didn’t quite understand (not even now), but which somehow did seem important. I dreamt I was talking with a black woman who had known and marched alongside Martin Luther King. I said something to her that now seems extremely lame, but at the time (in the dream) felt like a revelation. I said, “I think the way to Martin Luther King’s heart was junk food.”

Instead of her slapping me or something, she said, “Well you know, he was on the road so much, marching or giving sermons or visiting local churches, and riding busses, that it was hard for him to get a decent meal in a hurry, little cafes wouldn’t serve black people, well, you can imagine how it was, so it seemed he lived on chips and Debbie Cakes and the like.”

Then I woke up. What the heck? However, it did humanize Martin Luther King and also made him seem like a good and dedicated man, to the extent of self-sacrifice. Why that would be important was that lately I had been reading so many various negative conspiracy theories of every stripe that it seemed to show that evil existed absolutely everywhere behind every historical event, and that virtually every person we think of as a hero was actually an agent of some demonic force or another, working to wreak our destruction.

The problem is that we don’t know, really, do we? I mean, if we weren’t there, we only have the word of historians, whose accounts conflict, sometimes diametrically. But what fascinates me is that there WERE people who KNEW, who WERE there, and something like a “universal knowledge field” has that actual information, if only we could tap into it. (It reminds me of when a house I had been renting had been burglarized and the sheriff came to search for fingerprints, he took a look at my dog who was sitting there wagging her tail and he said to her, “Who did this girl, huh?” We both KNEW that SHE knew who the burglar was, but unless we could accomplish a “Vulcan mind lock,” we’d have no way to get the information. But something in the Universe, be it human alive or dead, or animal, or even plant…KNOWS the truth about something!

For example, the concept that America didn’t have to enter into World War II, that it was only evil international financiers who wanted it and when they got their political puppet FDR into office, he manipulated events that caused the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor and then it all began. We could have actually stayed out of the war, because we otherwise weren’t any danger.

However, I remembered back to my father telling us of his life months prior to his death about how he was selected by the Navy to learn about and then set up a program of demagnetizing our ships so that enemy torpedoes wouldn’t have an easy homing to them. For one of his first experiments, he was working at a naval base in South Carolina and his work interrupted an exercise the commander of that naval base had planned. The commander was fuming, saying, “When I find the guy who did this to me, I’m gonna punch him in the nose!” However, the commander changed his tune when Dad’s tests revealed that the Germans had seeded Charleston Harbor with something like 40 mines! (Dad later ended up with a naval base of his own to command, on Okinawa, and his work continued to save the lives of countless American sailors.)

While this is a cute and proud story in our family’s history, I realized that it also showed that the United States had not been isolated from global events concerning this war. I don’t think we hear much about German submarines in the Atlantic coming so far as to mine an American harbor, but my father’s own history demonstrates, that as far as I was concerned, this was an actual attack on the U.S. on its EAST coast by Germans, so it wasn’t all about Pearl Harbor, and it seems that our entering into the war WAS based on truly being in danger, not due to the manipulation of financiers or a trick by FDR.

Now, regarding Martin Luther King whom I had the dream about, a dream about him might have been timely in that we had just recently had Martin Luther King day and the Internet is filled with articles about how King was a Communist and a womanizer who loved prostitutes, some of whom he was violent with, and that King never wrote a word that wasn’t plagiarized. Hum. One of the problems with all this is that even if it were true, as a symbol, Martin Luther King provides hope and self-esteem for a whole race of Americans and it may not be a good idea to destroy that symbol. However, I’m going to talk a little bit more about this later in this piece.

Tuesday afternoon, I had an appointment to see my doctor. All I wanted him to do was write a referral for me to have a colonoscopy, a test I never had had and didn’t really WANT to have, but which I finally had been convinced by friends at work that it would be beneficial for me to have.

However, my doctor said that he hadn’t seen me for several years, so since I was there, he wanted to do some blood work on me. Okay, some blood work wouldn’t hurt.

After the blood work, he said, “I think your blood pressure might be a little bit high, let me take your blood pressure again.” The nurse had taken my blood pressure when I first sat down, I think it was 128 over 90. My doctor said “90 is a little high, it ought to be between 70 and 80.” When he took it again, this time the lower figure was 82. Still slightly above normal, but not too bad.

Then he tried to take my pulse, but seemed to be having trouble with it. So then he put his stethoscope against my chest and listened for quite some time. When he finished, he said, “Your heart rate is irregular, you’re going to need an EKG.” So the nurse came back in and gave me an EKG.

I laid there calmly, thinking that the EKG wouldn’t really show anything bad, but once it was over, the doctor said that while it was serious and that I needed to be seen by a cardiologist, it wasn’t so serious that it was an emergency.

What? Not so serious that it was an emergency? But I felt fine, more or less, or at least I felt more fine before hearing this information than I felt afterward! Anyway, the doctor wrote out a referral slip for the colonoscopy that I had wanted-but-not-really-wanted, and then another one for a cardiologist that I really didn’t want. As for the reason I needed to see a cardiologist, he wrote down “atrial fibrillation,” which I quickly wrote down on a piece of paper for myself so that I could look it up later.

The nurse explained to me that the medical group had a new procedure regarding referrals—she was to fax them the referral slips, and then I would receive appointments by mail. Well, that seemed okay. Waiting for the colonoscopy was fine, and as far as the cardiologist goes, maybe this delay would give me some time for this thing to fix itself on its own.

I was eager to get back to work so that I could look up on the Internet just what an “atrial fibrillation” was. But as I drove up the freeway, I was thinking of the defibrillator that we have hanging on the wall in our building’s lobby, which both scared me (fibrillation is something dangerous enough that we bought an expensive emergency machine for), and gave me hope (this is something that maybe an electric jolt can fix instantly).

However, reading about it on the Internet did not put my mind at ease. An atrial fibrillation is a condition in which the upper two heart chambers do not pump the blood properly—the movement is out of sync with the normal heart rhythm and the blood, instead of being solidly pushed down into the lower chambers, kind of swirls around in mild turbulence in the upper chambers before finding its way down into the lower chambers. The main danger of this is that the blood can pool and then clot in the upper chambers, and then the clots might cause a stroke later. A person with an atrial fibrillation is seven times more likely to suffer a stroke.

A second danger is that the arrythmia will precipitate a heart attack.

So, while I was not necessarily in any immediate danger, I nevertheless now had a heightened risk of stroke or heart attack.

Okay, so how do they fix this thing?

This is where I didn’t think any of it sounded too good. Depending upon a variety of factors, the cardiologist may want to find out what the cause of this is (yeah, I am sure all the tests are horrible). However, none of the usual causes seemed to relate to me: recent heart surgery, smoking, alcoholism, a heart valve problem, cancer, or cardiovascular disease. Of course, I may have some sort of cancer, or cardiovascular disease, but somehow I kind of doubt it. The way I look at it, this is one of those conditions that could be caused by any number of things, including in a major way, STRESS, which also means that maybe I have a way I can fix it myself.

Other than working on whatever could be the cause of this (dealing with any cancer, for example), the major task is to reset the heart to a correct rhythm and to cut down on the danger of stroke from blood clots. Blood thinning medication is what they prescribe for cutting down on the blood clots…of course, this is systemic, which means that a major healing mechanism of the body will be messed with. (Don’t cut yourself while shaving!) Resetting the heart rhythm to normal is attempted by various methods, including the following:

Oral heart rhythm medication
Intraveinous administration of a heavy shock of medication while in a hospital
Electrical shock that stops the heart—like shown in the movies with the two external contacts (paddles)—and then it is hoped that it will start again in correct rhythm
A more focused electrical shock applied inside the heart via a device threaded through a vein starting near the groin

Of course, none of these intense rhythm-resetting methods (the shocks, and so on) will necessarily mean that the rhythm will stay rhythmic. So it is mostly expected that a person with this condition will be taking two different heart medications (blood thinning and rhythm regulation) for the rest of his life. One must note, however, that all of the choices of heart medications carry side effects and it is a matter of balancing the importance of the heart issue with the importance (or relative unimportance) of various other organs. In other words, the quality of life is going to be diminished in one way or another.

Then there is the matter of what happens in case the rhythm cannot be corrected by any of the above-mentioned methods. Then either a pacemaker or a defibrillator is installed into the body under the skin. Of these two options, the defibrillator is the worse, in that what it is doing is administering a periodic shock to the heart, which has been described as being like a kick in the chest periodically. How would you like going through life with that?

I’ve not read of any suffering coming from the pacemaker except for the fact that you would have this machine like an iPod nano inside of you clearly outlined underneath your skin (there goes any weak hope of ever regaining your youthful beauty, you’re clearly way over the hill now!) and sometimes in order for the pacemaker to work properly, the section of the heart that naturally tries to control the heart rhythm will have to be destroyed so that it doesn’t interfere with the work of the pacemaker, thus there would never be any more hope of a natural correction.

A pacemaker does require special care though (watch out for those “No Pacemakers Enter Here” signs!), plus you have to go in for outpatient surgery periodically to get the batteries changed. If you can emotionally get past the concept of this and think, “Wow, the amazing advances of medical science, what a cool machine,” your momentary elation can be let down by this frequently-seen sentence describing this heart condition, with pacemaker or without:

“People with this condition can live for several years.”

Several years, huh? How many are those? I remember as a kid thinking, “a couple means two, so ‘a few’ must mean three.” I guess “several” must mean four. I have four more years?

As I read all this stuff, I realized that the answer to my prayer of the previous night might be this, not the Martin Luther King dream, but I went into the office of my friend Kate to tell her about all this, including the prayer and the Martin Luther King dream, and she wisely pointed out that the dream combined the concepts of, well, “dream”, as in “I have a”, and “heart”, and maybe there was even a message in there about food, or nutrition, or all the things about loneliness, needing comfort, travel, freedom, heroism, discrimination, non-violent revolution, and other huge concepts. I thought that this observation was very wise and it has given me much food for thought.

I also went in to talk to my friend Monique, who is black, who said that gee, she had never had a dream with Martin Luther King, which reminded me of several decades ago when I had had an earth-shaking dream featuring Paramahansa Yogananda and I was telling a Yogananda devotee about this and she said, “I have never had a dream featuring Yogananda, you are surely blessed by the Master.”

But if I was blessed by Martin Luther King in this dream, I have also been blessed by a minister in an African Methodist Episcopalian church in North Carolina, who changed his whole sermon one Sunday morning when he saw me and my friend Steve (both of us white) sitting in church with Cleo (who was black), who had been my mother’s “nanny” (the word used back then was “nurse”) and whom Mom grew up loving as much she loved her own mother. I had told my mother that on a trip around the country I was taking with Steve (we ended up being gone for three months and traveled 15,000 miles around the U.S.), when we got to Asheville, I wanted to visit Cleo, what did my mother think, should we take her out to dinner? “No,” Mom said, “take her to church. She is too old to get there by herself, now, and that is something she will really love.” Mom’s idea was perfect, and not only did Cleo love it, so did the whole congregation, and the minister in his sermon used our presence as an example of how Martin Luther King’s dream was surely coming true.

I want to stop here right now for a moment and point out something in case it wasn’t obvious—think of the relationship between my mother as a little girl and my mother’s “nurse” Cleo. Cleo bathed and fed and put my mother to bed every night. Cleo listened to my mother’s prayers. Cleo held my mother’s hand every day when she walked to school, and it was Cleo who was waiting there at the school when Mom came out, to take her by the hand and walk her home after school. Of course my mother loved Cleo and of course Cleo loved my mother, but this was a little white girl and a black woman living in the South prior to the 1960s. How were they able to express their love, or even have any kind of equal relationship back then? This could only be a mutual yearning and something that it was hoped was understood, but never easily shared. It was stuff like this that was a pain of our country’s own version of apartheid that hurt both races.

So to me when we think about the work done by Martin Luther King, it really doesn’t matter if in his personal life he was a hero or not (although I am going to think that those “anti-King conspiracy theorists” aren’t really right), it was what he helped to accomplish that was the important thing, the essential thing, and that is where our focus needs to be.

As I drove home Tuesday night, wondering if I could die any minute, or were my remaining years to be years of suffering and effectively chained to the cardiological medical establishment (no, say, sailing around the world on an indefinite adventure like the traveling I had done so much on land), what I felt, instead, was love flowing through my heart, and I felt that no matter what this was all about, it was likely that part of God’s message to me in answer to my prayer was that I need to express love more and more; that I could be an imperfect channel (like Martin Luther King maybe was), and yet what comes through is what it is all about.

That instead of me making a list of all the things that I want to do before I die, now that time is diminishing, maybe what I need to do is to think of what that ONE thing is that I need to do and forget all the rest. So far, I feel that if I have to face God and explain what my accomplishments were in this life, I don’t have too much to say. I had to think a little bit about what I even could say, and what I came up with was, “Well, everywhere I went, with everyone I met, I tried to leave a little blessing, which might have only been a bright smile that said that I honored who they were, but I always tried to treat everyone with love if I could.” Would that be enough? That I think that it is not might be a partial cause of all the stress that I have been feeling lately; like I am simply wasting time, going through the motions of life, being a nice person, sure, but not getting done what I am really supposed to do.

I have often wondered if God, or my Higher Self, might simply take me out. “You’re not getting anywhere, you’re just a waste of breath.” Now it looks like the means to do so was easily there, and it was now up to me to decide whether I should relax into the route of death, or else counteract it making meaningful progress. My choice, die, or live.

When I got home, I searched on the Internet for a video of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which I easily found, since we just recently had had Martin Luther King day and Google would therefore take me straight to it. I hadn’t known the full length of that speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial as the keynote of the March on Washington…we are usually given only the last part of it. It was very wonderful to watch it in its entirety, every word of it true, and when he comes to the concluding “I have a dream” part of it, this man was not reading, this man could not have previously written this and then memorized it word for word, it seems so clear to me that Martin Luther King was channeling this, being a vessel of inspiration, speaking this straight from where all true wisdom comes from. And I needed to reconnect with that kind of communication.

That night before going to bed, I decided to listen to my heartbeat with a stethoscope that I have. I’m not sure if that was a good idea or not, but I guess I needed to hear it for myself, even though it was kind of scary.

I’ve heard my own heartbeat many times before, and before it was always a steady and clear “bump bump…bump bump…bump bump…”, something the miracle of which I was always so appreciative of but could not grasp what it is that makes such a thing happen, that this organ can continue to beat steadily like this without let-up for ones entire life. But this time, it was more of a weak, muddy, and confused beat that I couldn’t even take my own pulse, because I couldn’t determine where it began and where it ended. There were no beginning and ending demarcations, and there was no resting inbetween.

I put my hand over my heart and said to it, “Poor sweet thing, what has happened to you, and more importantly, what can we do to straighten you out or to give you what you need?” From hearing it, I was surprised that I could even be still alive, that on the outside I could get up, walk around, and feel normal. But then I realized that even a car whose timing is out of whack, with the cylinders operating a confused four-stroke pattern, can still lurch down the road. But not for very long, and not very far.

I blamed only myself for this crisis. Wasn’t I the one who had been saying for so long that (certain aspects of) “this job hurts my heart”, or “this apartment is killing me”? Wasn’t I the one who realized that I was suffering in so many significant areas of my life and needed to make some major changes, but had no idea what changes to make, or how to make them, or could not find the courage to make them? For so long my mind had been a turmoil of trapped indecision and now my heart was reflecting that very turmoil by swirling my life force in a whirlpool of ineffectual turbulence.

You sincerely ask God for an answer, and you will get it.

Obviously this week at work was a very tough one and just about the only value of it was my interaction with other people. Also, I kept thinking that as long as I was expressing some form of love and blessing to others, I would stay alive.

I don’t want to give the idea that I was being completely fearful of death. Instead, I thought more of my mother, who had suffered during the last several decades of her life, but somewhat prior to her death had revealed to my brother that she was thankful she had a heart condition, because now she had a “way out.” And, indeed, she did die peacefully in the night and despite all her very serious physical problems, it was, ultimately, her heart who had taken her out. So I felt that, like my mother, I now had my own “way out,” if I wanted it, but that it, itself, wasn’t going to be the agency making the choice.

I wonder if most people don’t really fear death, itself, but just fear having a painful death? If they could just close their eyes and drift away to a better world, that might be something that they would actually like, except for the fact that in this boxing match that we call life, they may not be quite ready to throw in the towel, but want to keep on fighting for a win that they have, after all, worked all their life for.

So that’s how I am viewing it.

Thursday or Friday morning, I woke up with what I think is a fantastic idea:

Acupuncture.

If we’re dealing with some kind of “electrical” forces that control the timing of the heartbeat, maybe stimulating certain acupuncture meridians is exactly what is called for. And a quick Internet check (I did a Google search on the key words “acupunture atrial fibrillation”) revealed that not only does acupuncture, itself, list among the maladies that it corrects heart arrhythmias, but that some western cardiologists have written articles stating that acupuncture has had success in resetting heart rhythms.

Now, while it had been several years between visits to my “regular” doctor, the doctor that I HAVE seen quite often (and who really has helped me every time) is who I call “My Chinese Doctor,” because he is both Chinese, and he practices Chinese Medicine.

Now there are some, of course, who would think of that as “quackery,” following the belief that ONLY in the realm of western “scientific” medicine are there any true answers, that all else is just placebo, mind games, superstition, or primitivism. But this is such an egocentric and maybe even xenophobic point of view, forgetting that a system like Chinese medicine rose up in a civilization that is far more ancient than our own and therefore its traditions have a validity on their own. Also, there is no such thing as “one condition, only one proper healing modality”; there are actually numerous healing methods that can and do work. I think it is severely limiting to follow only the “approved” medical course, especially when that “approved” medical course doesn’t offer you very much. And in my case, a lifetime of dangerous medicines that may help one organ while hurting several others doesn’t sound like the best course to follow if there are other options.

So I called my Chinese doctor, explained to him what was going on, and asked him if he thought acupuncture could help.

“Definitely, along with some herbs,” he said. So while I still hadn’t gotten my appointment from the cardiologist, my Chinese doctor was able to see me on Saturday.

It is interesting to go to him. He works out in Alhambra, where there is a quite a large Chinese population; in fact, I think the Chinese are the majority there. English is not his first language and when he does his examinations, he takes notes in Chinese. I think he probably doesn’t have a lot of patients who aren’t Chinese. Sometimes I have to work to interpret what he saying, which comes out almost like poetry, and by that I mean that I think Chinese is a very poetic language, which I base on how their written language is constructed. For example, the word for “autumn” is composed of the words “burning” and “season”. “China” is “center” “country” (duh…ones own place is at the center of the world). “Friendship” is “hand” “reaching” “moon”. And so on. I am assuming that their spoken language follows the same kind of construction.

I explained to him what I had learned about how western medicine handles atrial fibrillation, what it has to offer, and he shook his head and laughed, not derisively. “Western medicine is so drastic,” he said.

Where western medicine goes to one particular malady and works to correct THAT, quite often creating an imbalance in the rest of the organism, Chinese medicine works on the basis of creating a BALANCE in the system. My doctor told me that heart problems don’t arise all by themselves. For example, in my case, the kidneys are involved and it is necessary to work on those as well as the heart.

His examination consisted of his carefully taking my pulse on various sections of both wrists. His reading of the pulse on my left wrist made him say, “heart pump very weak.” His reading of the pulse on my right wrist made him say, “metabolism very slow.” Then he listened to my heart with a stethoscope, and he said “heart all floppy, starving, not pumping strong, malnourished, desperate, crying for help.” I said to him that what he said made me think of a fish that was taken out of the water and placed on the desk, “flopping around gulping for air, but in the case of my heart, it is gulping for nutrition”. He nodded, yes, that is a good explanation.

I reflected back on my original question to God about why I felt ravenous all the time, and the answer had something to do with “the way to Martin Luther King’s heart was through junk food,” which could be interpreted in a sort of Chinese language way as “loving heart not getting food it needs but taking weak comfort as substitute.” Something in my weary spirit was blocking the activity of my heart and I had been taking comfort in “escape” is how I read that.

Then my Chinese doctor examined my tongue and the first thing he said was “you didn’t eat breakfast?” Wow, he could see that? I told him that there is a coffee shop over in nearby San Marino that I wanted to treat myself to for breakfast, which I was going to do after my visit with him. I do NOT routinely skip breakfast…in fact, it is the one meal that I always insist that I get. I kind of hoped that he might pick up on the implications of that “treating myself to a breakfast there,” the meaning of which, underneath, was that I was not otherwise receiving a lot of love. Again, “the way to Martin Luther King’s heart” might be COMFORT FOOD (if he could get it). “Tongue very dry,” the doctor said.

He then asked me to curl my tongue up so that he could look underneath it. “Very dark blue,” he said, which he considered a very bad sign and confirmed for him the kidney connection.

In summary, Chinese Medicine style, he explained that I was imbalanced in my fire and water. “Fire rises,” he said, “water seeks to go low. In the body, like in nature.”

Okay, I got the idea that “heat rises,” and “water flows downhill to the low places.”

“Too much fire,” he said. “Water is prevented from going low.” I took this to mean that fluids in my body, such as my blood (but also could be lymph and other fluids) were having trouble circulating like they would like to and should, so things were sluggish in my metabolism, and not enough nutrients, oxygen, and the like, were being carried by the bloodstream into my heart at the rate they were needed, so the heart, which, of course, needs the benefits of what the blood brings as well as the rest of the body, was, itself suffering and therefore unable to do its job properly.

I gathered that this “water” problem was in the kidneys, and what the doctor wanted to do was “cool down the kidneys” as well as “clean up and purify the blood”, which would improve things all around. I asked him what would cause this problem in the kidneys, but he shrugged his shoulders and said “I don’t know, it just happens.” But rather than thinking that this was the hole in the Chinese Medicine system, I kind of chuckled and understood that yes, things DID happen. Maybe I wasn’t drinking enough water, or something (there’s never enough of doing that, it seems).

He then pulled around his “acupuncture man”, an ivory-looking statue of a man with all the acupuncture meridians drawn on it and each acupuncture point identified with a pair of Chinese characters. He showed me where he was going to stick the needles. The first place was in the center of the palm of the hand, where he said, “This is going to hurt.” Funny, for some reason, I hadn’t thought that acupuncture was actually going to hurt, otherwise I might not have thought it was such a good idea.

“But they’re sticking needles into you, what did you think!” (That’s some voice within me talking, not the doctor.)

He tried to explain to me in English the name of this and all the other points, but he just didn’t know enough English in order to do so. Well, looking at that statue covered with hundreds of points, I could well imagine that it would be impossible to translate them all into English…it would be like coming up with Chinese terms for every kind of IRS deduction or subtotal. You know words like “passive loss carryover” or “unearned income deduction” or whatever. They may not even HAVE English translations. I mean, after all, even our own medical terms aren’t really English, but various syllabic combinations of Greek, or maybe Latin.

Anyway, the palm of the hand starts the heart line, and then there were two points on the wrist that control the timing of the rhythm. On the forehead near the hairline were two or three points that he described as “the spirit,” which I took as meaning the genesis of the impulses that control the heart chambers. Then there were two or three points near the ankle that work on the kidney line (interestingly, that was right in line with the idea of “water seeks the low places”). Fortunately, the only point that he said would hurt was the one in the center of the palm.

He then took me into his acupuncture room and asked me to take off my shoes and socks and lie down on the table. I also took off my glasses and rolled up my sleeves.

He joked about how there was almost no room on the table for me, because my feet were right up against the wall. “For Chinese people,” he said, who are shorter, so it is entirely possible that I was the very first Caucasian he had ever had in there. I joked and said, “So you don’t get many basketball players…seven feet tall.” He shook his head, no, no basketball players.

Then, after swabbing the various locations with alcohol, came the needles. He was going to do this on both arms and both legs. He started with my right arm. The needles in the wrist area I could hardly feel. He asked me if they hurt and I said said “No.” Then I could feel that he was poised over my hand, and he said “This one will hurt.” And yes, it did, although the pain was quick and it was tolerable.

Then he reached over the left arm and, again, the wrist needles didn’t hurt. And again, he warned me when the needle for the palm of the hand was going to come, and YOW! That one made me shout out, oh BOY did that one hurt, like an electric shock! And it kept hurting for a while, but then calmed down. He said that that was very good, the pain showed that it was the right place and that it was working.

Then he went down to the ankles and warned that they would hurt, too, which they did, but differently. The kidney needles burned, but then the pain died down. He told me he would leave the needles in there for fifteen minutes, he set a timer, covered me with a warm blanket, turned off the light, and shut the door.

I lay there calmly with something like twelve needles in me and did not dare move. I can’t say that it was relaxing, but it was okay; fifteen minutes would be bearable.

After the timer rang, he came in and took out the needles (which didn’t really hurt, although I could feel them coming out). The area where the ankle needles had been itched a lot at first, which I told him, but he just nodded.

After I got my shoes back on, he gave me a bag of the herbal pills he was prescribing for me—one bottle was herbs for the kidneys, another was called “blood clots cleaner” and the third one was called “pulse resetter”). I was surprised, but happy, to see that the functions of those latter two herbs were similar to what a cardiologist would prescribe, but safe and with no side effects. So I felt that I was getting exactly what I needed.

He told me that the pills were a two-week supply, that I should come in and see him again in two weeks.

I asked him what his advice would be concerning my potential upcoming cardiologist appointment, should I go to it, or should I skip it?

He asked me when the appointment was going to be, but I said that I didn’t know, it was going to be mailed to me…it could be a week away, or maybe a couple of weeks away. He advised me to NOT go see the cardiologist until after I had seen HIM two weeks from now. “Then we will see,” he said.

Okay, that is fine with me. I really don’t want to get all started with the cardiologist if this Chinese Medicine treatment works.

I left his office feeling very good, and then went to breakfast at the Colonial Kitchen in San Marino. I ordered my “usual” for when I go there, which they call “The Titan” (so I think you imagine), and it was delicious, of course, but ended up being more food than I could possibly eat, which I took as a good sign. Ordinarily, I would have eaten the whole thing, but this time, I could only manage half of it. I hoped that meant that the acupuncture had already gotten some nutrients properly circulated around to the heart. Maybe that was wishful thinking, but there was no arguing with my sudden change in appetite.

Before hitting the road again, I went to the bathroom at the restaurant and while I was sitting on the toilet, I began to wonder if it would help to periodically massage the acupuncture point in the center of the palms of my hand, working on the heart line. As I massaged the palm with my hand, I suddenly realized with a shock that that was the point of the placement of Jesus’s crucifixion nails. The realization immediately brought tears to my eyes; for one thing, this was the point that HURT the most, but also, I thought that with the power of JESUS’S heart, the pain must have been immense. Then I thought how amazing that was symbolically and it seemed to tie together the disparate elements of the physical heart, the loving heart, Jesus, and acupuncture.

The Jesus connection didn’t die down, because I spied sitting on top of a pile of books at home a little volume called The Way Out, which caught my eye because its title was what my mother thought of her heart condition, “her way out,” but I knew that this book was a collection of four Christian essays. So I got comfortable and read the first one, and it really spoke to me about how my own negative self-talk could create the manifestation of this heart problem and also that the way out would be to realize that my struggles were failing to solve my problems, which led to this heart condition as a manifestation of my struggle, but that a surrender to God (and God’s guidance) would be the solution. Well, I certainly already knew and understood that, but it never hurts to be reminded of it, especially when you aren’t following it and that not following it gets you into serious trouble!

I thought that first essay was enough for me to chew on and practice for a while, so I have saved the other ones to read at a later time. Meanwhile, I felt that the rest of Saturday was a good time for me to read some things that a close friend of mine had given me a couple of weekends ago when I had gone to Palm Springs for the three-day Martin Luther King holiday.

I had started, but never finished, a post here about that weekend, but I will just say that this is a friend I have known since I was a freshman and he was a junior in college. I used to write to him quite a lot when we were much younger, quite notably during the summers between college years, and then after he graduated and entered into the Navy while I was at Berkeley, and then at other significant periods in our lives. He had saved all those letters, but now that he is retired, he decided to start getting rid of a lot of stuff and came across this collection of letters. He read them all once more, and then said to me that he can’t imagine why I am not a best-selling author today. Anyway, he thought that the letters were wonderful and figured I would love to have them back. Wow, yes, I sure would!

So I spent the rest of yesterday reading these letters and of all the things that I could have done, I can’t think of any better care for my heart than to have read these letters! For one thing, laughter is supposed to be good medicine for the heart, and I think these letters of mine made me laugh harder than anything I have ever seen in all my life, including I Love Lucy episodes or my favorite funny movie, What’s Up Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, and Madeline Kahn. But beyond all the laughter, I don’t know any other way to say it, I simply fell absolutely and utterly in love with this person whom I was oh so long ago, who was so sweet, so precious, so smart, so talented, so beautiful, so thoughtful, and SO FUNNY! Whatever happened to him? I want him back, I want to see him, to be him, to feel him back inside me. Surely the chafing of life and the rigors of aging are not enough of an explanation for the loss of that person, and maybe that is what, or whom, my heart has been yearning for all this time—me, my true self, whom I started out to be and whom I should be once again.

So please God, I surrender to you. Please let the water flow...down from you and through me.

Undercurrents of Evil...and Good

[Imbedded Practitioner of the Dark Arts]

I am really way behind in my reading (which means amount of reading desired and number of books purchased versus number of books I actually have time to read), so one of my resolutions is to schedule more time for catching up on that. But I am also way behind in my movie-viewing, which is sort of a subset of the above problem, so I have made a less-important resolution to schedule more time for that, as well.

Among “the above” is Harry Potter reading (which yes, I consider important); I haven’t had time to go beyond the third book. And last year, I didn’t even manage to go see the latest Harry Potter movie, The Order of the Phoenix (number 5, I think), but during this past Christmas season, I did buy the DVD, and last night I finally watched it.

Now, for reasons that I will explain in this blog, as the story of that movie unfolded, my dropped jaw nearly crashed a hole in the floor of my apartment. And it wasn’t due to Dumbledore’s kick ass battle against Valdemort that made Yoda’s heretofore kick ass fight at the end of Star Wars number III look in comparison like a little girl’s tea party, as wonderful as that scene with Dumbledore was! No, it was the basic PLOT, itself, that blew me away. But let me explain….

For the past couple of decades, I have been reading, first articles and then books, by John Taylor Gatto, and then later I was able to attend a lecture by him in person, and finally, I bought several audio tapes of his other lectures. I greatly admire the man (I’d put him the category of being one of my personal “gurus”) and have found him to be immensely inspirational, not just about children, but about how we all learn.

It was also mostly from John Taylor Gatto that I developed a profound appreciation for our country’s founders (especially Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington) and of their amazing wisdom and self-education, and wish I could emulate their example much more than I manage to. I had an appreciation of these men before, demonstrated right down to the fact that ever since I was in the sixth grade, I have abbreviated my first name in my signature the way that several early American heroes abbreviated that same first name when they signed the Declaration of Independence (a signature is a picture of one’s own image of self), but Gatto greatly deepened my appreciation of them for me.

And from working at a school as I do, I can verify one of the concepts that Mr. Gatto propounds, that children are voracious “learning machines”, you don’t have to “make” them want to learn, and, in fact, what happens in school, instead, is that the children’s energy gets diverted, derailed, imprisoned, and indoctrinated—in other words, seriously messed with until it is nearly destroyed (much less so, and in some cases not at all, in private school, because the Powers That Be realize that they need SOME people to be leaders of the masses). By the time kids are in high school, they hate school, and some even become murderous in that hate. What happened to that sweet, precious, learning-voracious child?

It was from Gatto that I first heard of the idea that state-run public schools were specifically designed to not educate children, but to mold them into docile subjects of that very same state, which had taken control of children away from their parents. This began, of course, in the most liberal and therefore most “big government” state in the union, Massachusetts, but it also quickly occurred in other similar controlling states (such as New York, naturally, where Gatto, himself, rebelliously taught for so long), but, fortunately, much less so in more education-freedom-oriented states.

For those who happen to be interested in this subject, here is where the states stand if you are interested in educational freedom for the parents and students and minimal control by the state (all this data comes from one of the most amazingly brilliant and useful books I have read in the past several years, Strategic Relocation, by Joel M. Skousen--THAT one, when it arrived a couple of weeks ago, I sat down and read from cover to cover at one sitting, and now I am studying it with a fine-tooth comb):

Most free, least educationally-controlling states:

Alaska
Idaho
Oklahoma
Texas
Missouri
Illinois
Indiana
Michigan
New Jersey (now that is a shock)
Connecticut
Rhode Island

Next best are those states that have very little state regulation of education:

California (believe it or not—but that is changing)
Nevada
Utah
Montana
Wyoming
Arizona
New Mexico
Nebraska
Kansas
Wisconsin
Kentucky
Mississippi
Alabama

Then come those states with a medium amount of regulation (which is too much):

Hawaii (huge hotbed of liberality)
Washington (ditto)
Oregon (ditto)
Colorado
South Dakota
Minnesota
Iowa
Arkansas
Louisiana
Ohio
Tennessee
Georgia
Florida
South Carolina
North Carolina
Virginia
West Virginia
Maryland
Vermont
Maine

And finally, the educational control Hall of Shame, states where based on this one issue alone, you shouldn’t live if you have school-age children you care about:

Massachusetts
New York
Pennsylvania (except for the Amish, who managed to secure a special dispensation)
Delaware
North Dakota

Seeing Delaware on that list, I had to nod my head in huge “well that certainly fits” agreement, because I have recently learned that in Delaware, that immense level of liberal state control has even moved into college. I read an article about a course (and there are several articles on the Internet about this) required in order to graduate at the University of Delaware that chilled me to the bone. It was about diversity and race relations and the principle it teaches is that white people (and ONLY white people) are inherently racist, and the cause of all the world’s problems stem from the actions and character of white people. At the University of Delaware, they teach this course on a “required outcomes” basis, a concept I also just recently learned about, which means that in order to pass the course (and if you do not, then you have to keep taking it until you do), you have to answer the test questions and write essays indicating your successful acceptance of the state’s approved indoctrination, that (if you are a white person) you accept your racism and historical culpability and present the steps you are taking to atone for and correct those self-deficiencies. Now if that isn’t standing at the threshold of 1984’s room 101, or Harry Potter having to write in his own blood several pages of “I will not tell lies” about something he factually knows is true , I don’t know what is.

I realized that if I even chose to stay at such a “university”, I would have understood that what I needed to do would have been to pretend and lie in my answers, the concept of which strongly goes against the grain of my being truthful in all of my communications and my lack of interest in wasting my time on games of mediocre conformity…in other words, my sense of personal integrity would have been seriously compromised.

But how much worse and self-damaging must it be to receive this level of indoctrination day in and day out by elementary school children, some of whom are hardly even old enough to be taken out of the arms of their mothers. And if these innocent babies fail to comply with destroying their individual truth, esteem, and integrity, they are in danger of being declared to have an attention deficit disorder or some such “defect” and prescribed a powerful mind-and-mood-altering drug like Ritalin.

[I accept the slight possibility that there may seriously be in some cases such a malady as ADHD, where drug intervention is required, but without a doubt, this diagnosis is way too frequently misapplied and the result of that more and more is Columbine-type school shooters (acting out) or else young adult suicides (acting in—thank you to Jungian analyst Alice Miller for the insight into these responses), such as the incredibly talented would-be comedian I became friends with when I did film work, who hung himself a couple of years ago and his parents and girlfriend informed us at the memorial we held in his honor that when he was a child, he had been put on a very heavy course of Ritalin medication.]

I watched the documentary, ”Who Controls Our Children” (which currently is posted on Google video, so you can watch it, too, if you are interested), put out by the Pennsylvania Parents Association (Johnstown, Pennsylvania), which explains what “outcomes based education” is and how it works, but not only in Pennsylvania, because it is a federal program (so how about that—instead of the local school board, or individual state controlling your child’s education, now the state can sign on to federal control of it). Well, this really rang a responsive chord within me, which meant that some more dots were connected in my understanding, because John Gatto had written that early industrialists were behind indoctrination-education for their own purposes, and now their foundations (such as the Ford Foundation or Rockefeller Foundation) and the lobbyists working for them are behind it. Gatto said that big steel-maker Carnegie wrote (and here happens to be that Pennsylvania connection) that big industry did not need free and critical thinking entrepreneurs (who would, after all, be competition to the big industrialists), but docile workers comprising a nation-wide hive of labor, and the schools had the power to create this kind of worker and that is now what outcome-based education is seeking to make. Incidentally, a docile populace is also what the state, itself wants, but let’s not forget who is behind the state (which is not a reality in and of itself, but is only a conceptual tool) and uses it for its own ends of police control.

I think there are students today who would even go along with this concept; that if school didn’t help prepare you for a job, what good is it? (This is actually appropriate for a vocational school and there is nothing wrong with that at all, but as a college student, I fell into this, myself, in a university, to my lifelong misfortune.) But the point is that you don’t want a job, you don’t want to be an employee or a wage slave, you want to be the master of your own fate, which is well within your ability if the genius self you were born with was allowed to be recognized, nurtured in its growth, and felt the freedom to manifest its creations in the outer world. This benefits us ALL as a society, by the way; we would have been so far beyond the stars right now if we weren’t hampered by this level of evil control of our spirit.

And make no mistake, it is evil, because it lessens the full majesty of the creation that you are.

And this evil apparently never ever really goes away, but bides its time for a while until the time is ripe for it come out and wreak its havoc on humanity once again, which, in more modern times, seems to happen when the next generation is finally comfortable and has let its guard down. But it is a very, very old and ancient evil…my favorite example of that level of ancient planning is the most recent version of the movie The War of the Worlds (directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise), in which the aliens had buried underground in the earth their tripod killing machines tens of thousands of years before there were even people on the planet in preparation for the eventual invasion of the earth for the purpose of colonizing and exploiting the blood and bodies of those future people. I don’t remember this particular “ancient” concept appearing in the original H.G. Wells novel, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, it was quite effectively presented in the Spielberg movie.

This is a very important concept, because people today wonder why it would be that industrialists would set up a program generations ago that would not benefit them personally, and that their heirs step by step continue with this work even thought it might not yet benefit THEM personally. And since this doesn't make sense, the average person rejects it as impossible.

Of course, in the Christian religion, this evil existed prior to God’s creation of the earth and the effort against humanity has been going on since the beginning of people.

War of the Worlds is cool, because it ends up that “God’s eternal plan” is greater than evil’s ancient plan.

After reading Joel Skousen’s book, there is a sense of “evil returning” once again in the form of Communism (now deeply infiltrated into the governments of the United States and Europe), which, according to the studies of Joel, never really went away anyway; that the “fall of the Soviet Union” was a planned ruse that successfully caused the American people to let its guard down. And, of course, it never even pretended to go away in China, despite how apparently “capitalist” they have become, the Communist party never let go of its totalitarian control. Of course, please realize that the yoke of socialistic principles is never for the rulers, anyway, or for their perverted puppets and lackeys, only for the bulk of the people (the “hive”). However, like all other all forms of evil, the dice are loaded against it…however, real people suffer terribly meanwhile. As an example, the Third Reich lasted only twelve years instead of the thousand years that it thought it would last, yet how many people suffered and died world-wide because of it?

I’ve always liked the Harry Potter books, because it is my belief that it resonates with children’s internal awareness of their own genius, not yet buried away or destroyed. While reading those books, they recognize that they are, themselves, “Wizards” in the midst of a society of Muggles, and maybe for a while this understanding will survive and maybe, just maybe NEVER fully go away. One can only hope that it will work this way, and I am very, very sure that it will, for some (there are those whose spirits somehow manage to get through this process at least somewhat intact).

So now we come to that amazing fifth movie in the series, The Order of the Phoenix, that I saw last night. Harry already KNOWS that the great evil of Lord Voldemort has returned, because Harry has seen him during the battle he had in the previous book and movie, and now also continues to experience him in his dream state and in his mind (which instead of demonstrating insanity, actually is a deeper level of knowledge). Harry’s friends believe him, because they trust in him, but also the great wizard, Dumbledore, Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Wizardry, understands that Voldemort has returned. However, the Ministry of Magic, which is the government of the Wizards, has instigated a campaign against Harry and Dumbledore, setting them up as the cognate of our present-day “Conspiracy Theorists” to be ridiculed and rejected out of hand, just as you reading this blog branded me the minute you saw me say that the Soviet Union never fell and that Communism had infiltrated our federal government. When I first heard of this myself, I didn’t doubt it, but saw, instead, how much it explained what was going on--suddenly the pieces began to come together. (If you want to pursue this further, you might want to investigate how President Clinton signed a presidential directive to the military that states that the U.S. will no longer launch nuclear missiles on the warning that Russia has launched theirs, but will absorb Russia’s first strike, and this directive has not been cancelled or rescinded by the Bush administration. Clinton’s directive ONLY applies to the former Soviet Union, not other nations. We apparently do reserve the right to launch a pre-emptive strike on, say, Iran.)

How incredible it was to see in this film that the Ministry not only created a constant media blitz to discredit those who knew the truth, but also set to work taking over Hogwarts school and sent there an Inquisitor whose mission was to get rid of all the free-thinking teachers and administrators, and who turned the school into an outcomes based institution, indoctrinating the students into the Ministry’s desired form of docility in the face of great and destructive evil. I hated that Inquisitor with every fiber of my being; it was fascinating how the actress’s portrayal of that character was so right on that it made my skin crawl right off my bones.

The Order of the Phoenix could not have done a better job of presenting a model of what is actually going on in the world today, to the extent that I almost think that J.K. Rowling, herself, is initiated into the true facts of what really is happening in the world--but to believe that is to at the same time minimize her artistic creation. I can only say with assurance that this is an outstanding example of how when one does enter into the artistic and creative realm, they truly are in touch with deep wisdom and truth. Which is why these books resonate so powerfully with so many children and open-minded adults. Spiritual truth is so much more powerful and compelling than temporary lies.

The Political Compass

Maybe it's just because I know more now that I did before, or maybe it's because I know less, but I think for most people, this upcoming election is going to be a confusing mess for most people and they will need some kind of framework to help them sort it out so that they can vote the way they really want in a way that will help them and will also help their society as a whole.

For example, I eat lunch almost every day with a friend at work who considers herself a died-in-the-wool Democrat. She is from Massachusetts, met and had lunch with Ted Kennedy when she was younger, and hates George Bush with every fiber of her being. If you were ask her who she is voting for for president in this upcoming election, she would say, "whomever the Democratic candidate is," because she feels that no matter what, she would never be able to vote for a Republican.

However, if you ask her what the two single most important ISSUES are, she would say the Iraq War, as in getting out it, and illegal immigration, as in getting the illegals who are now here deported, and making sure that no others can come in.

Why does she want us out of Iraq? Well, the most important thing is that she has two daughters of draftable age, and her feeling is that those girls are being sent to Iraq over her dead body. The draft hasn't been reinstated, of course, but the fear is that if the war continues much longer, we will have to have a draft.

Secondly, she views the Iraq War as Bush's war, so if it has anything to do with him and his ideas, then she doesn't want any part of it.

Why she wants illegal immigrants out of here is pretty easy to explain by the simple fact that she lives in Southern California. Actually, it doesn't even have to be Southern California any longer; I was so shocked to see the small city of Novato in Marin County (north of San Francisco) infested with hordes of illegal aliens at every street corner. You even had to shoo them away when you tried to get gasoline; there were some hovering around, sitting on the concrete curbs that surrounded the various gas pumps. They really were everywhere and, of course, this isn't even talking about you having to wait in the emergency room to get some medical attention, or have your kids try to find a desk in a public school.

So which Democratic candidate should she support based on these two select issues? See the problem?

For a long time, I've been aware as a voter how the one axis of decision,"left" versus "right", or how it normally turned out, Democrat versus Republican, was an inadequate scale by which to judge candidates.

But now I have learned of a system that uses two axes, The Political Compass, that helps bring it all more into focus.

The Political Compass still has as a horizontal axis, the familiar Left to Right opposition, which is the ECONOMIC LINE, with Socialism on the left and Laissez Faire Capitalism on the right. The more you agree with having a governmental system of taking care of people via diminished private property rights and enforced taxation and applying those funds to government-created welfare programs given out to the benefit of various select groups of people, then the more to the left you are. On the other hand, the more you believe in the right to private property and in having a free market where prices and the availability of resources are determined by supply and demand and efficient production by those who had taken on personal risk in hope of sufficient reward, without external interference, then the more to the right you are.

But there is a vertical axis, too, on the Political Compass, and that is the Authoritarian versus Personal Freedom SOCIAL LINE. Do people have the right to order their own affairs, or do they need the strong hand of an authority outside of themselves (such as a government) to keep them in line? I suppose at the most free point of the line the situation would be "the freedom to choose to do anything you want, even if it hurts YOU, so long as it doesn't hurt or interfere in the freedom of another." So if for example you want to take drugs (so long as you don't steal to obtain them, or drive a car or fly an airplane while on them), who else would have the right to say that you shouldn't be able to do so? Nobody would have that right, but you, yourself, to determine your own actions.

But if you feel that people could not, or should not control their own affairs, but require experts, or those who have a greater might, or feel that they have a superior moral standing, to make those determinations for them, then you stand on the Authority end of the axis.

Governments, of course, and the people who desire to hold office in them (and thus obtain greater personal power) tend to be on the side of AUTHORITY (so long as it is THEY who are the authority!).

Some of the problems we have today is that people can no longer imagine having no authority over them; they willingly subject themselves to such rule (and thus, slavery), because an opposing idea is inconceivable to them. Or if they think that they could handle that kind of freedom, they sure don't think their fellow man could, so they want there to be an authority to keep their neighbor in line, and if they, themselves, have to submit to that same authority, well, it's a small sacrifice to pay in order to keep the peace and to feel safe. Notice I said "feel" safe and not "be" safe. But I believe that to truly be safe, or at least safer, in the world, requires a self-reliant and mutually-cooperative populace of equals (equal opportunity, not equal outcome), not a horde of subjects who have given everything over to an external power to rule, protect, and save them (which it will ultimately fail to do). Benjamin Franklin, one of the main founding minds of our country, said that those who give up their freedom in order to gain a little safety will end up losing both. Isn't that happening to us, today?

So here, for our reference, is a graphic of this system:


There is a test you can take at the site linked above in order to get an idea where you might fit on this graph. Here is where I came out:


While it is not surprising to me how much on the SOCIAL freedom side I placed, I know that a year ago, I wouldn't have placed so far on the right, because I was like so many others; for so long we have swallowed the socialistic propaganda we have been fed, so that no longer can people think of "big oil companies" without thinking "greedy big oil companies". Despite their utter dependence on oil, people nevertheless want to hamper big oil companies by, for example, taxing their "windfall profits". But exploring, finding, drilling for, refining, bringing to market, and selling petroleum and its products is a hugely costly and risky business. It requires incredibly large investments and a long lead time before those investments begin to pay off. Well, these big oil companies have laid their money on the line and they are bringing in the product; do they not deserve to reap the benefit of their efforts? Of course they do, and some of that benefit will be used to keep the machinery going for some more. Throw a monkey wrench into that and you won't even be walking to work, you won't have a job, because your former employer couldn't function without petroleum, but maybe you will be able to plow with a mule a field you sharecrop.

Let's use a different arena...J.K. Rowling who struggled so long and lived so meagerly, wrote the first Harry Potter book by hand, at a cafe. This was her own creation, brought forth by the sweat of her brow and her steadfast discipline to bring this creation "to the market".

Where and how does J.K. Rowling stand, today? She is the second richest woman in England. Does she not deserve the full benefit of the risks and struggle she made, and the reward for her marvelous and well-loved creation that has brought joy to so many people and nearly single-handedly made children into readers again? Will the profits she will make on her most recent novel in the series be considered "windfall profits," deserving of increased taxation? I think not, and you shouldn't think it either, or else whatever raise you next get for some achievement at work that earned you a promotion, or the extra salary you earn due to that master's degree that you earned for yourself taking night classes while you worked full time should all be taxed away, too.

Maybe it isn't "greedy capitalists" against "the people". Maybe it is greedy lazy people against those who are actually doing the work and bringing home the bacon. Where does the government get the money it gives to the people on the welfare programs and to the entitlements? From other people who MADE the money. From you. Take a look at your final annual income statement--it's easy enough to find, the year 2007 only recently came to an end. What percentage of your total earnings did you give out in taxes? Federal, State, Social Security, Medicare, SDI, etc. Multiply that percentage by the number of months in the year and that's how many months you were WORKING FOR OTHER PEOPLE, strangers out there. Did you really choose to give that much of your labor away to others, or was it forced on you? Well, it was the politicians who forced it on you, and it was people who voted them in. Maybe even your votes contributed to it. (But maybe not any more!)

I think these quadrants are easier to understand when you can see some names on them:


And here are some leaders operating in the world today:


What I find it interesting are those people down in the southwest quadrant, the Gandi and Dalai Lama quadrant. Gee, shouldn't we be down there? Well, Gandi ran around in a loincloth; I guess he didn't care about property rights so much. And the Dalai Lama has no home; he and his people are living in India kind of like the Katrina victims who needed help getting out of New Orleans were welcomed by Houston. Maybe that's unfair, the Tibetans were "victims" (of the Chinese), but the socialist side of the economic line is FOR victims. But somebody has to pay the bills.

As far as I can see it, just about the only way you can have that southwest quadrant, which is sharing of property and assets without being forced to by authority, is to have some kind of commune or spiritual community with shared values. There haven't been too many of those that have been successful, but I can see how it could work out if everybody agreed. After all, one of the tenets of the FREEDOM axis is that people have the freedom to order their affairs any way they want, just so long as other people's freedoms aren't harmed, so if everybody agrees to live in a mutually beneficial socialistic system, then that is their right. I don't view Gandhi or the Dalai Lama as being, or having been, corrupt. This isn't rule by Stalin. Would it work in a country as large as the United States? Maybe, but it's hard to imagine. We might think we have a Gandhi, but end up with a Castro.

Okay, so now for the chart on where the CANDIDATES stand (if whoever put this together was accurate):


Wow, virtually all of them (except Kucinich and Gravel) are somewhere in the AUTHORITARIAN/CAPITALISTIC quadrant, EVEN Ron Paul, the freedom candidate, and even Hillary Clinton, whom I and others have blithely branded as a socialistic candidate. Fortunately, not a Hitler or a Stalin among them, which helps me to breathe a little bit easier. And notice that few of them are all that different from the much-disapproved-of President Bush. Maybe this is just a sign of how the powers that be simply WANT us to have that kind of a candidate ONLY, so that is all we get.

For me, coming out like Milton Freedman on the FREEDOM/CAPITALISM quadrant (the pure Libertarian quadrant), the closest candidate for me is Ron Paul, who the media continually crows has nothing but crackpots for supporters. Well, he does graphically show that he stands out from the bulk of them (again except for Kucinich and Gravel), but hardly "crackpot".

He, by the way, is who my friend at work should vote for, even though he is a REPUBLICAN. He says he will pull us out of Iraq IMMEDIATELY, and he also wants to clear out the illegal aliens (he's from Texas, so that makes him like us in California).

For me, the Iraq War isn't the big issue, because I have decided that I have absolutely NO idea what is going on down there, so I have little qualification for making a decision. Unlike many people, I don't get all my news from one or two sources (who have a definite agenda of manipulating the public). I get news from a huge diversity of sources, conservative and liberal, religious and athiest, domestic and foreign, and I have heard so many conflicting stories, from it's a total mess to we are actually accomplishing what President Bush set out to do, that I simply have to guess at the truth. And what I guess is (a) we got Saddam Hussein out of there, (b) there were no weapons of mass destruction after all, (c) our government has been so far successful in preventing any other serious terrorist attack, so they more or less can truly say "Mission Accomplished" based on the basic mission they presented regarding going in there. But to stay further, will further results be worth it?

I believe what Ron Paul says when he says that (a) the war was illegally declared Constitution-wise, (b) we are invaders in foreign soil which agitates terrorists against us (just as we would be, say, if we had been invaded by China...or let's say Japan, ha ha ha), (c) we can't afford it, our dollar is nearly collapsed as it is and we are now in debt up to our eyeballs, (d) the founders of our country warned against foreign entanglements, and (e) we can protect ourselves with our soldiers back at home and with a renewed, refreshed, and more efficient intelligence system. So all that sounds good to me.

To me the absolute most important issues are to prevent the steady enroachment of our civil liberties (so I want to pull toward the FREEDOM pole of the vertical axis, which is "south") AND to prevent the destruction of our FREE ECONOMY (so I want to pull toward the FREE CAPITALIST side of the ECONOMIC pole, which is "east"), so who on that chart is the most "southeastern" candidate running, but Ron Paul. And so that is what makes sense to me.

If Ron Paul does not get the nomination, who is next in line for me? I have to place a ruler on that chart at a diagonal from northeast to southwest, starting at the southeastern corner, and slowly move up to see who that line touches after Ron Paul. Surprising to me, who that ends up being is Hillary Clinton. She's closer to Ron Paul than I ever would have thought (but not THAT close!--she's just closer than the others). Hillary, good Lord, who woulda thunk it? (But she's corrupt, I think, which Ron Paul isn't; for Ron Paul to lose the nomination, which the media is doing its damnedest to make happen, would be a terrible loss.) After Hillary, it's kind of a crap shoot. The worst though, would be that awful Biden-Obama-Dodd-Richardson-Romney line. And horribly, both Obama and Romney are being pushed as really strong candidates. On the INTERNET, just like Ron Paul is strong, so is Obama, so THAT'S a bad sign.

Romney's the most AUTHORITARIAN of the bunch, so that is really bad. Edwards is the most SOCIALISTIC of the bunch (again excluding Kucinich and Gravel), which is also bad.

Anyway, if nothing else, it's all fascinating, and I still have to comfort myself by saying that despite where they stand, we can thankful we have no Hitlers or Stalins in there.

If you're somebody who never even considered Ron Paul (probably because of the media's hatchet job), here is a WEALTH of information. And once you see what the media is really doing, it will make you hopping mad.

And then if you want to REALLY get into it, please check out this INCREDIBLE ARCHIVE of Ron Paul writings. You will see that this brilliant and scholarly man has been around for quite a long time, and has been very prolific. He's certainly not new on the scene like that fraud Huckabee. I've known of Ron Paul for decades. It seems that whenever something bad happened in Congress (which was a lot), Ron Paul was always that lone individual who did what was RIGHT.

And by following the Constitution and trying to continue what the founders of this country carefully set up, you could hardly do wrong.

Christmas Diary

[Family Christmas 1973, taken by my brother, so he is missing in the photo]

8:30 A.M.

I woke up early (6:30), which I didn’t expect to, but I guess I’m still following childhood habits on Christmas morning! (The rest of the year, not so much.) It’s now 8:30 and I have made several trips downstairs to dump some garbage. I do believe that I am the only one in this building up, which is surprising. Of course, not everybody is here. I realize that this is the first Christmas morning I have ever been here, or even the days leading up to Christmas, and following it.

After I got up, I lit an angel candle for the apartment and a vanilla-cinnamon scented candle for the kitchen. Then I sat down on the couch with a wonderful cookbook that my friend Patty gave me, The Early American Cookbook, which is made up of the favorite recipes and dishes of famous men and women throughout America’s early history. I wanted to figure out special dish to cook for breakfast. I had bought enough staples yesterday that I probably had whatever ingredients I needed.

I selected a dish I had never made before, “Mrs. Jefferson’s Egg and Tomato Bake,” which I think is fitting in that Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite people in history. That dish is currently baking in the oven.

In order to even prepare that dish, I had to wash a couple of sink-loads of dishes. I won’t even tell you the condition of my kitchen (or the rest of the apartment); I’ll leave that your imagination. However, one of the projects I want to work on during this break is the apartment, so today is as good of a day as any to get a good start on it!

I also needed to throw away some garbage, thus the trips I made up and down the stairs. It was fresh and cool feeling outside, and very quiet, which is unusual for Hollywood. It had been extremely windy last night, and the evidence of that was shown by the large number of palm fronds that were all over the patio. The poor pool man is going to have quite a time when he comes to clean the pool! Even though the pool was covered with various palm tree detritus, the pool still looked inviting enough for a swim (but not this season!). Since I had used the pool so much in the summer, I wonder what the residents of would think if I went for chilly swim Christmas morning! (But I’m not that brave.)

The idea of maybe taking a nice walk later popped into my head, but meanwhile, I am getting my exercise by dumping this garbage—three trips up and down the three flights of stairs so far. And, sad to say, I’ve got several more trips of garbage-dumping yet to do! In fact, right now I’m going to do some more before my breakfast is done in the oven.

9:09 A.M.

The breakfast was good, although I think what made it was the fried bread crumbs and bacon topping, not the tomatoes and eggs. Of course, in a way, I may have lost all ability to correctly determine. While I was waiting for the eggs to bake, I was thinking of what to drink. I decided to follow our family’s “adult Christmas” pattern (which means that we who had once been children were now drinking adults...but there were still children present, in the form of my sister’s kids). We’d wake up, having something hugely sticky-sweet, such as a coffee cake or some kind of sweet rolls (something we wouldn’t normally have for breakfast 364 days out of the year) and coffee for those who want it. I decided to skip the coffee this Christmas morning.

Then, as we sat in the living room SURROUNDED by presents, we’d chow down on the coffee cake and Dad would place on the coffee table Dad’s punch (we know no other name for it), which really gets the present-opening party going, which will last all day until it is time for Christmas dinner.

We’d open our presents one-by-one, starting from the youngest in age and moving on up. I don’t want to open presents in any other way, because it is so much fun to see what everybody else is getting (we don’t just care about only ourselves) and, this is especially good if what somebody is opening is something that YOU gave them, which everybody else gets to see. As I think you can imagine, we were very careful and thoughtful gift-givers in our family, always working extremely hard to give amazingly wonderful gifts that were to be well-received, which they almost always were. Which is one reason why I am (kind of) glad to not be doing that right now, because I just don’t have that kind of energy this year. (But then again, here it is Christmas morning and I don’t have any presents to unwrap. Maybe I’m kind of stupid! I am also wishing that maybe I hadn’t opened Donna’s box of gifts so soon, as, other than a few people at work, she is the only person who gave me gifts this year.)

Huh, what’s that you say? You wanna hear about “Dad’s punch”? Well, glad you asked!

This is for sure a “crowd pleaser” no matter what your guests normally think about liquor. Dad says that this is his own version of a “French 75”, and I can see that is somewhat close…but no cigar. For one thing, Dad always liked to put in about five times the liquor than normally called for. I mean, Dad wanted the liquor! (Mom, too.)

I haven't made this in a long time and I think maybe I got one aspect wrong, but I already see that regardless, it has begun its desired effect. Now, this drink will send your brain right up to the stratosphere! It actually feels “spiritual” in a good and positive way, but I think maybe all it is is a very effective drunk.

Anyway, the way Dad makes it is in a large sterling silver punch bowl (because you are going to serve a crowd). I don’t have the silver punch bowl, so I just used a crystal pitcher, which even that is probably too much drink for this poor single body.

Pour in one whole bottle of champagne and one whole bottle of vodka, then add a certain portion of…well, for years Dad used frozen pink lemonade concentrate, but the past couple of years he used frozen limeade concentrate, which was a huge hit, so that is what I used this year. I don’t remember how much, I think one can of the frozen juice, but today I think I used too much. You repeat the above recipe, bottle-by-bottle of champagne and vodka and can of frozen juice concentrate until the punch bowl is nearly full. Then you fill the bowl with tons of ice (I think the ice is probably necessary to dilute all that liquor). This is a drink that will make you HAPPY very FAST!

I had made it one time (with the lemonade) for a party I gave when I was in law school and you wouldn’t BELIEVE the goings-on that happened that evening. [I mean, some guys took to walking around with their cock and balls hanging out of their unzipped pants which the girls seemed to enjoy instead of running away screaming, and one friend, whenever he had to take a whiz (which was often), simply used a handy wastebasket…he was having so much fun that he didn’t even want to “leave the party” for the time it took to go to the bathroom. Yet, even with all that, not one person vomited. It’s a high like you won’t believe, but it doesn’t make you sick.] All of which reminds me, I’ve got to get back to giving parties….

For myself here today, I used one split of champagne, which I poured into a measuring cup first to see how much a “split” was (it’s basically a cup), and then poured in a matching amount of vodka, which was kind of hard to do, because I am used to making drinks by the jigger, not by the CUP (by the 1½ ounce, not buy the 8 ounces)! But anyway, I poured it in, and then put in a cup’s worth of limeade concentrate and then filled the pitcher with ice cubes.

I think maybe I should have put in only half a cup of limeade; the “lime” in this mix is a bit too intense for me.

So far, I’ve had only one old fashioned tumbler full of the punch and already my head is a hot air balloon several thousand feet above my body. And during our adult Christmases, we would keep drinking this punch ALL DAY until the entire Universe was spinning and about the only way we could walk from one end of the room to the other was to lie down flat on our backs in the living room. Not that we were drunks or anything.

This really makes me miss Dad. He was sure some bartender, LOVING to mix drinks for guests, who loved to come visit and enjoy his drinks. This is part of the reason that after my parents got old enough that most of the friends of their own generation died, they merely moved down to the next generation and made friends. Of course, it was mostly due to the fact that they were cool, loving, and brilliant, but one can’t discount the positive effect of the liquor! Mom always said that it ISN’T a party without liquor, and to her, a “party” was two people sitting together in the same room.

Gosh, what great people they were!

[Dad at the bar, Christmas 1985]

2:00 P.M.

Well, I spent most of the morning looking for a particular cookbook out of which I wanted to make several dishes for my Christmas dinner. It’s the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Cross Creek cookbook, one of my favorites. I know it saw it around here somewhere a couple of weeks ago, but now it is nowhere to be found. I carefully looked on every bookshelf and restacked numerous stacks of books that I have no place to put, so they are all over the floor. I also have hundreds, if not thousands of books in boxes in storage in various locations. I can’t even imagine what books are in those boxes at this point, but I do know that the Cross Creek cookbook isn’t one of them. It really hurts my heart to have so many wonderful things that I not only can’t use, I can’t even find, or, worse than that, remember that I have. I somehow feel good about all that, though, for some reason. A solution will come, a decent place to move to, I can’t help but keep feeling that. It’s unreasonable to have to live this way and therefore there is a solution that I will be willing to take.

I wasn’t terribly set on those Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings recipes, anyway (pecan-stuffed chicken, cream of peanut soup, and so on), so found a recipe for stuffed whole chicken on the Internet that looked good (and it sure smells good cooking right now!), and I adapted an Adele Davis recipe on chestnut dressing so that I could use the pecans I had bought. I think it will all turn out okay, so I am happy.

When the Cross Creek cookbook finally does turn up (I will be happy to find out where it actually was!), I will laugh and then treat myself to recipes from it some other time. One of the things I really plan to do STARTING NOW is do a lot more cooking, and by that I don’t mean the simple, easy to do (diet) crap that I have been making lo these many years, but delicious, wonderful recipes that are a joy to prepare and even better to eat. Careful with the portions, though. But today, Christmas Day, to hell with the portions.

The whole time I was looking for the cookbook, and also doing some sorting and cleaning up while I was at it, I was, of course, enjoying Dad’s punch. I see that with more of the ice melting, the limeade isn’t too bad, so maybe I did make it right after all. It FEELS right, anyway.

While I was looking through stuff, I found a pile of papers that had been Dad’s, one of which was his top-level security clearance application he had filled out so that he could work on government contracts with the Atomic Energy Commission. It’s very cool in that it has a resume of all the schools he went to, and when, and all the jobs he ever had. It has every address where he lived ever since he got married, and the dates he and Mom lived there (and me, too, for most of that). I’m going to put those addresses and dates on a spreadsheet so that I can get a good picture of my personal history in that regard. Some of those moves were confusing to me when I was young and the memories have gotten distorted, so now I will understand their timing more.

5:00 P.M.

I got a “Merry Christmas” phone call from my friend Bob in Palm Springs. He was having a quiet day himself, too. He said the view from his apartment was glorious, the setting sun was reflecting gold on the snow-dusted mountains. He makes me feel thankful for the job that I have. For one thing, all this time off we get right now. He works at a Petco and worked yesterday and will work again tomorrow. I guess he was lucky he hadn’t had to work today, too!

He all but hates it. When I met him, he was office manager of a very small business in Beverly Hills. I worked there, too, for a while. The owner retired a couple of years ago and closed down the business, so Bob was out of a job. Bob took this as a good time to get the hell out of Dodge (L.A.), but Palm Springs, where he went, doesn’t have much of a job market. Bob’s biggest problem job-wise is that he never learned computers (they used typewriters in that office), which means that he is utterly unqualified for any office job, now. Thus, the retail sales job at Petco. Actually, retail wouldn’t be so bad for him, except he’d rather the product be a fine line of men’s clothing, something like that. But he enjoys being with the animals and pet accouterments, it’s just that he is lonely there. All the other sales people are “young kids” and he can’t relate. Also, the company is extremely badly managed.

But he was feeling hopeful in his phone call. The company brought in a new hotshot manager to “whip the store in shape for the essential holiday retail season”, some young female martinet whose abrasive attitude rubbed Bob the wrong way from the get-go. He had a meeting with her to let her know that her manner was not working with him (he really didn’t care if he got fired), but she was having none of his advice. “This is the only way I know how to be,” she said. Too bad.

So he wrote a letter of complaint about her to upper management and apparently so did several others. Perhaps most telling of all was that the store had its annual Christmas party and according to Bob, only two people showed up, and he sure wasn’t one of them. “Who were the two?,” I asked. “The new manager and the assistant manager,” he said. (He had been told this by the assistant manager.) I guess that party might have been fun for those two if they were into S&M and it took place in a dungeon. Anyway, this kind of thing is a strong indication to upper management that things aren’t good out there. Of course, their solution will probably be to fire all the sales staff, but Bob thinks they will actually get rid of the manager. Well, we’ll see.

6:30 P.M.

I guess I ought to give an honest review of my dinner, which seemed to take forever to cook (you know how the indicator on that meat thermometer seems to NEVER get up there to the top where the “poultry” temperatures are?). The chicken was okay; it wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t serve it to company. I think the recipe called for cooking temperatures that were way too high, but I am used to slow-cooking a whole chicken in the oven overnight (comes out tender and juicy beyond belief), which of course I didn’t do for this. The person who submitted the recipe said that her family never eats the skin. At first I took this as her telling us how holy she was (no matter what diet I am on, I detest the idea of throwing away the skin and therefore never do), but now I realize that with that recipe you CAN’T eat the skin, which dries up and turns into pork rinds or chicken jerky. The chicken inside the skin was okay, a little dry but at least not burned, but only merely acceptable. I guess if someone likes “extra crispy” when they get Kentucky Fried Chicken, this would be okay. But it could be that my oven runs hotter than it should.

The hybrid stuffing that I made was the best part. What was wrong with that, though, was that there was about a cup’s more of it than I could fit inside the chicken, so I put it on the baking pan all around the chicken on the outside. Big mistake. Although I think that was something I could do with the pecan stuffing recipe I had hoped to make, if only I had found the cookbook. However, being exposed like that (instead of safe inside the chicken), it all burned to charcoal and it looks like I I will have a horrible time cleaning out that pan! Also, it absorbed all the juices as they dripped during cooking, so I couldn’t baste properly. Instead, every so often, I sprayed olive oil on the chicken. I had never done that before, so maybe it was that that contributed to the crispy skin, I don’t know.

The cornbread came out good, though, although I can take virtually no credit for that as I took the easy way out and used a Marie Callender’s mix. So easy, pour the mix into a bowl, add water, stir, and then pour into a cornbread baking pan. Interestingly, mine came out better than the cornbread does in the restaurant. In the restaurant, the bread is crumbly and you can’t eat it with your hands, it just breaks apart, so I eat it with a fork like cake. The home version, though, hung together nicely.

I also went easy with vegetables and merely cooked up a frozen package of artichoke hearts, which I felt was different from the usual fare of peas, corn, broccoli, or various beans, that I eat every day. Ah, they were a bit too fibrous and not all that exciting. But that was my fault; I could have made something a little more interesting. (The recipe I was GOING to cook out of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings cookbook is a truly sinful “carrot soufflé”.)

Having enough starch with the bread crumbs in the stuffing and the cornbread, I decided against the other dishes I considered, some form of rice, or maybe garlic mashed potatoes. What I already had was enough, so that was it.

For dessert I had gotten a Sara Lee frozen pumpkin pie and some vanilla ice cream, but after all that dry and baked other stuff (and the ultimate result of a faint odor of "burnt" in the air), I couldn’t get into baking yet something else, and my palate craved something cold and creamy, so I just had the ice cream by itself.

9:00 P.M.

I suddenly got very sleepy and decided to lie down and take a nap. I woke up about a half hour ago and figured that maybe that pumpkin pie might be nice, now. So I put it in the oven along with an oven thermometer to check the accuracy of the oven’s thermostat. That will be ready in about another half hour. Meanwhile, I fixed myself an eggnog. Again, I took the easy route (remember, I still actually have the flu) and simply bought “store-bought” eggnog. For liquor, I put in a jigger of dark rum and a jigger of Crown Royal and dashed nutmeg on top. That went down so easy, I just might make another one to go with my pie. I do have more ice cream, but I think I had enough with Christmas dinner.

It looks like this holiday was more about drinking than anything else. I went through the pitcher I had made of Dad’s punch and enjoyed every drop. I knew with my first drink of the stuff that I wasn’t going to go driving anywhere today, Which is fine, I am perfectly content to stay home.

9:35 P.M.

The pie is ready, but I am supposed to let it sit and cool. The oven thermometer read a perfect 350, but the dial was set at 375, so it actually cooks a little LOWER.

10:30 P.M.

The pie was good enough that I had two pieces. And what the heck, it needed to have ice cream with it, so I succumbed to that. While I enjoyed my pie, I also enjoyed watching on my computer all my favorite music videos that I had bought from iTunes. I’ve long loved music videos and decried the decline of MTV. Now it looks like the iTunes store may be taking up some of the slack. It's a good thing I bought this iMac with the huge, wide-screen monitor!

Bedtime:

I’m writing this final section the day after the fact. Around 11:30 P.M., I got into bed, but read a couple of chapters out of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, which is the third or fourth book I have gotten in the “PIG” series, which I love. I hadn’t known before that the word “capitalism” was a pejorative devised by Karl Marx, capitalism’s gravest enemy. Prior to his coining of that word, it was known as “Free Enterprise.” However, free enterprisers willingly adopted Marx's word "capitalism", because they understood that capital, which you get when you don’t spend all your money but save for future productive investment, is a foundation of free enterprise. Those who agree with socialists somehow think that free enterprise is bad, but that’s because they didn’t have the foresight to save their money. Envious of those who did, they devised a method of stealing it (“'fair’ reallocation of assets”) from those who have it and giving to those who don’t (themselves). Isn’t there a fable about this? The grasshoppers and the ants, maybe? Is that really saying that socialists are a plague of locusts? Yes, I do think that is exactly what that is saying. But no wonder socialism is always a clock that gets wound once and then runs down and eventually stops. It’s run by people who don’t understand money, and when you systematically steal it from those who do, you remove their incentive to make more of it. So you kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Wow, I’m just now realizing how much economic sense exists in old fables!

Anyway, it was a quiet, but enjoyable Christmas. No complaints…just a non-frantic feeling of bliss.

Snapping Out Of It

Yesterday it was reindeer, so today we will have a sleigh! Isn’t that beautiful? There actually is a company, called Sugarloaf Mountain Sleighs that makes “real live” sleighs for people to use (wouldn’t do me much good here in L.A., but it would be cool to have something like this in a rural location in a snowy region). Sugarloaf Mountain Sleighs is located in Pennsylvania, and I wonder if the Amish buy sleighs from them? Probaby not, as these are too pretty for the Amish, but the Amish strike me as the perfect people to use something like this. But wouldn’t it fun to ride across snowy hills and dales (to grandmother’s house!) in something like this (assuming you had the horse and all)? It takes my imagination back to quieter, more peaceful times. Of course, I’m not against snowmobiling! But this seems romantic.

Does anyone here subscribe to GoodWord? One of our school librarians turned me on to this and I have subscribed ever since. Every day you get emailed a word, its pronunciation (which you can hear), its use in conversation, and its derivation. It’s the derivation part that I like the best. It probably goes without saying, but there is a lot of wisdom located inside of words, and if a person wants to keep learning, understanding words themselves is probably a good place to start.

Today’s “good word” was “sleigh,” and it was that site that had the link to the Sugarloaf Mountain site.

I feel much better after what might have been a somewhat mournful post yesterday. Well those moods do come upon us, sometimes (and lots of times around Christmas), but I snapped out of it. I opened a box of Christmas gifts sent to me by my good friend Donna, and among some great books and music, she tucked in some Crabtree & Evelyn shower gel, after shave balm, and soap, all in a manly scent called “Nomad” (which I still am, a nomad, although perhaps more in spirit now than in actuality). I don’t really know how to handle shower gel, I guess you just squeeze some on a natural sponge and scrub away. That’s how I used it, anyway, as a special “perk me up” treat. With that and the after shave balm that I used afterwards, I was surrounded by a very subtle masculine fragrance that made everything seem wonderful. I’m going to treat myself to some of it today, again, after I post this. I haven’t showered yet, today…I just had a breakfast of blueberry waffles and, sorry to all those health nuts out there, but I used only white flour this time, so that, too, was a special treat. (I normally put in half or three-quarters whole wheat flour, but I happened to be out of it, so I gave myself an indulgence.) WITH butter and real maple syrup, thank you very much! (I probably would have loved to have gone in a sleigh to get some maple sap up in a forest in Vermont. And if the butter had been churned from freshly-drawn whole Jersey cow milk…. Okay, let’s not go too far; picking these things up at the grocery store three blocks down is pretty nice; I’m not complaining about commercial convenience!) I also had one three-cup size of hazelnut-flavored coffee and a glass of orange juice. I don’t know what it is about orange juice and me, these days, but suddenly there is no more delicious thing on Earth. Orange juice is the nectar of the gods! I can’t get enough of it. Maybe due to the flu my body is craving Vitamin C, which I haven’t been so good about taking this time. But the natural source of it is probably better than a pill, anyway. Regardless of the reason, I have become “a pregnant woman and pickles” about orange juice.

I spent the rest of the day yesterday combing through dozens of websites, trying to find the ideal combination of “mountain lodge in the snow” that also offered a huge Christmas brunch (that I could afford), or, failing that, some other potentially beautiful fun place. While I found lots of possibly good places, none of them quite hit the mark I was searching for. I tried Big Bear Lake, Yosemite National Park, and Idyllwild (in the mountains above Palm Springs), all of which do have snow, but then I worried about the drive getting INTO those places (not quite so eager to slide my Cadillac off the side of a mountain or get it stuck in a snow drift just for a Christmas dinner in the snow). If I were going up for a weekend of skiing or snowshoeing, that would make more sense.

So instead I tried Disneyland, which is definitely open on Christmas Day, from 8 AM to midnight—but then discovered that is the single most crowded day there in the whole year. So next I tried the Danish town of Solvang (that was the best bet financially), and The Festival of Lights at The Mission Inn in Riverside (one of my favorite hotels in the world) and THAT made Solvang pale in comparison, but realistically, it was just too expensive to enjoy all by myself, so ultimately I hung up the whole idea and went to bed.

My sister called me back this morning and yes, it had been her cell phone cutting out because while we were talking, she had been driving through the wine country of Napa heading toward Clear Lake, but when she started to ascend into the mountainous portion of the trip, she immediately got beyond signal range. Then, making it into a comedy of errors, the back of her cell phone fell off and her battery fell out and as the car swerved around curves, the battery disappeared somewhere into the ozone under the seats. I think her cell phone is one that is “rode hard and put away wet,” because (to my knowledge, anyway), she doesn’t have a landline, since she has three different domiciles (if that is the right word), so the cell phone makes more sense. (So she is more of the nomad than I am, currently. As for me and MY cell phone, I think I use it only to call AAA, which means I use up about ten minutes every two years.)

My sister definitely sounds like someone who could benefit from a Bluetooth cell phone connection to her car radio or some such technology. Maybe her fiance will give her one for Christmas.

So she hadn’t hung up on me, but had been incommunicado for a day, until she managed to find where the phone’s battery had hidden itself.

She had also been depressed and crying, though (she told me), for reasons I wrote about yesterday. I definitely do understand.

She’s going to have a quiet Christmas with her two kids, just the three of them in their beautiful house on the lake. I think that will be wonderful and probably better than a noisier and more crowded “family thing”. Since she’s in that mood (and I think I am, too), I am guessing that my brother and his wife are also wanting the same thing. This will actually be the first time they will have had Christmas in their beautiful Las Vegas house, and I imagine them being like a honeymooning couple, which they deserve, because they so brilliantly help so many other people with their weddings. And as for my other sister, she wouldn’t have ever joined the rest of us for the holidays if our parents didn’t more or less make her come. Now that they’re gone, so she is she.

I decided this morning that I wasn’t going to let nostalgia and sentiment ruin this Christmas break, and running around like a chicken with my head cut off in trying to make this one day into something that I remembered from the past was a bit silly. Instead, I should work on making the whole break into something fruitful, STARTING with Christmas Day. I was strongly reflecting on that beautiful slogan that had been on the Grove Park Inn site, “Over nine decades of history. It’s time for your story now.” That’s MY responsibility, and nobody else’s.

Right now, I’m planning on cooking my own Christmas dinner for tomorrow. I am going to enjoy my personal setting and location and make it into something nice—a task that will take the whole of Christmas break and beyond, but now is the perfect time to start.

So I’m going food shopping right after my “Nomad” shower gel and after shave balm treatment! (But first, another glass of orange juice, please!)

Have a Merry Christmas, everybody!

Looking Backward Through The Tunnel

Here is a picture of three of Santa’s reindeer, resting up for the big night (tomorrow night!). I took this picture several years ago at an arctic animal zoo in Swedish Lapland beyond the Arctic Circle. (I am very pleased to say that I have been beyond the Arctic Circle, just as I have also been as far south as Stewart Island, New Zealand, which had been used as the southernmost disembarkation point for explorers headed to Antarctica…although, sigh, I have not been to Antarctica, itself.) I think these animals are extremely cute and elegant with that immense rack of antlers they carry like emperors’ crowns on their heads.

These magnificent animals are, for the Lapps, like buffalo were for the plains Indians, except that the Lapps have domesticated the reindeer, like cattle. It’s because of their selection as Santa’s mode of transportation in Clement Clark Moore’s A Visit From Saint Nicholas that I have become more fascinated with them. I think Professor Moore needed to locate Santa Claus in a secluded hideway and somewhere way up north was a great idea. What better beast of burden to select for pulling Santa’s sleigh than the reindeer (whose name is a derivation of the Old Norse “hyreindyri”, meaning “horned animal”)? I don’t think vicious and deadly-dangerous polar bears would have worked as well, for example (although, heaven knows, they sure are cute).

I’ve ordered for myself from Amazon.com a beautifully-illustrated children’s book, The Reindeer People, by Ted Lewin, which I hope to read to some children’s class or another next year, as we head into the Christmas season. I notice that Amazon.com has continued what I see as a recent trend to include some pissy negative review from an unhappy librarian from somewhere (but I choose to follow my own eyes which were strongly drawn to the art on the cover, plus the immensely glowing review by another reviewer). Honestly, I understand and trust what some view as “capitalist greed” more than I accept a hidden sociopolitical agenda, whatever that exactly is for Amazon.com. I wouldn’t mind too much if every single review they publish is glowing for the product they are trying to sell—I would expect that and keep it in mind. (Does the local car dealer, for example, publish articles about how their cars are lemons?) Of course, I realize that one of the good things about Amazon.com is that basically they sell everything, so they aren’t picky about product. And they are already more or less quite fair in letting the general public review the books, as well, and it seems at first glance that they publish the bad as well as the good. Whenever I order a book from them, I glance at both the very positive and the very negative reviews, to get a good spread of opinions. But lately I have noticed that Amazon.com will remove some negative reviews, which I most recently discovered them doing with the reviews of Al Gore’s latest book. So obviously Amazon.com shares the Al Gore agenda and feels that it is within their right (as a what?) to support his point of view, as do other corporations whose product I otherwise enjoy or admire, such as Apple Computer and Starbucks. (It’s been reasonably simple for me to boycott Starbucks, but Apple, I can’t boycott as I think their products are the best ones going, and in their case, Gore is actually on their board of directors--yikes!)

I guess corporations have had political agendas all along, but when that agenda is socialist (or downright communist), I get very confused. That’s been explained, though, by several analysts, that socialism is only for the “people”, not for the “elites” (I dislike that term, particularly when applied to those who are anything but really “elite” in my mind, but human garbage, instead, but I haven’t yet figured out another word to use), so I guess I should understand it. After all, I did have the dubious privilege several decades ago of helping escort a Russian Communist party member on a tour of Disney World (not a good combination of energies). While most of the people in the Soviet Union were living a cold, somber, gray life waiting in long lines for bread, this privileged party member was buying all her cosmetics and fashions from France, could buy a new car whenever she wanted one, and lived in elegant quarters with a glorious view of the Kremlin. She would spit out expletives whenever you mentioned the name “Gorbachev” and his “glasnost,” which she abhorred. Her main reason for coming to the United States was not to see the sights (which she cared nothing about), but to buy as many computers and peripherals as she could carry back home on the plane (Aeroflot, of course).

Those beautiful reindeer may be waiting for the big trip, but I doubt if they are stopping at my house. This is looking like it will be a “solitary” Christmas this year, which I guess is about 65% my fault.

For one thing, I’ve had a terrible case of the flu these past couple of weeks. I had it a couple of weeks ago where I stayed home from work for a couple of days, attempting my usual healing regimen of sleeping the whole time, except I really couldn’t sleep. But it did seem that I got better (but not all the way), so I went back to work. I had things I wanted to do there, anyway.

However, this last week at work, it came back upon me very seriously and while I really didn’t want to do it, I just had to stay home some then, as well, which meant that I missed out on a lot of the Christmas goings-on and only returned to work that last half-day before the break began. Even now, I still don’t feel really well—while the cockroach-throat and whooping cough is bad, it is body aches, especially in the neck and upper shoulders, that are getting me the most—but I can’t see staying in bed this whole break, so I’m doing my best by being out and about in a limited way.

Meanwhile, I finally figured out that Christmas is only two days away, Christmas Eve is tomorrow! I had been waiting, once again, just like I have been ever since October, for my brother to say that the work on our parents’ house is done and the house is now on the market. He wants us to come up there to see the completion of his (and our) glorious handiwork. I’ve been saying all along that he definitely deserves the great family “ooh and ahh” show, plus we all want to see it, but waiting like this for this call to come any minute messed up my sailing lessons which I couldn’t sign up for, so now they’re held off until February, and Thanksgiving was almost ruined because of it, too. Since the house wasn’t ready for Thanksgiving, Christmas, for sure, was the chosen time. So I have been waiting to hear about that and finally called one of my sisters last night to ask her if she had heard anything—and just got her answering machine. (Calling my brother feels like pushing him, which I am in no way trying to do…I only want to know what kind of holiday plans I can or can’t make.)

She called me back this morning and the gist of it is that the house is still not ready and my brother went back home to Las Vegas without telling anybody, so now she feels that there is no way to expect him and his wife to drive all the way up north (again!) for Christmas at her house, which she doesn't feel like having anyway, and he seems totally dispirited and disinterested in Christmas right now as well, so for sure there won’t be Christmas at his house, either.

I feel stupid and helpless waiting around like this for OTHERS to make Christmas plans, but I do not have a place where anybody can come to, so no matter what happens, I’d be some kind of a hanger-on to whatever family Christmas somebody else was going to devise or else have no family Christmas at all. Not really a good situation, but that’s how it is.

I think the deeper truth is that none of us really know how to celebrate it without our parents, and since things are still in flux, we’re all in a state of limbo.

Last night as I tried to fall asleep with my aching neck on a heating pad (didn’t work, so I gave up on the heating pad which felt like it was just burning me anyway), I reviewed how many Christmases in my life I had had without my parents and the rest of the family. I could think of only three times. There might have been more, but I sure don’t remember them. That means that out of my total lifetime of 59 years, 56 Christmases were with the family, and the nucleus of all 56 celebrations was our parents. And since I don’t have a family of my own (i.e., no wife and kids, for example), I’m just a loose ball bearing running around aimlessly on a field.

Not every family Christmas was total joy (a few of them were blasted miserable), and one of the non-family Christmases was, strangely enough, one of the best Christmases I ever had. The other two non-family Christmases were not good though; they were when I was a guest at some OTHER peoples’ Christmases, and that is something I know I don’t want. Plus I don’t like the idea of a couple (or a group) of pathetic solitary individuals getting together and attempting to make something of a holiday for themselves sans family. I’d rather be alone.

I was alone for that one great Christmas, alone in New York City at the age of 24. Not that it had been a quiet Christmas season…just the opposite. Spending the Christmas season in New York could not be more glorious. It was all “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” and “Mame” and maybe even “Miracle On 34th Street”. I remember one of my grandmothers, who lived in North Carolina, would go to New York twice every year, once in the summer to go to all the plays on Broadway, and once in the winter to do all her Christmas shopping. Having been in New York for Christmas, I could see why she would do that. I bought tons of presents for everybody--Bloomingdales, which impressed me because they had their own subway stop, was where I bought most of it—but I bought things from several other stores as well, including FAO Schwartz, Macy’s, Barnes and Noble, and a few tiny stores and some street vendors, as well. I saw President Nixon and his wife Pat, who had come to New York for the holiday, at Rockefeller Plaza, and Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy, who had also come at that time, docked their yacht, The Christina, right near the street on which I lived, so I walked two blocks over to the Hudson River and feasted my eyes on that beautiful thing. It had two lighted Christmas trees, one on the bow and one on the stern. Very exciting!

Even though it was cold and the sidewalks were slippery, I loved New York for Christmas. I never felt alone, and actually, I wasn’t until the final days of Christmas, because I had friends and we were busy partying, drinking, and dancing. But then they all took advantage of days off from work (or school, where they were getting advanced degrees) and flew off to Athens or Italy or London. So that’s why I was alone on the actual day, because I stayed in New York.

I loved the apartment I lived in and had a bay window all the way across the width of it that allowed me to look out onto the street, West 71st Street. There was always stuff going on outside my window. I know it sounds peculiar, but I kept my TV tuned to a station that broadcast a constant view of the cheery fireplace in Mayor Lindsay’s mansion while Christmas music played. I know that sounds corny now, but somehow tuned into that fireplace kept my apartment warm and cozy. If I wanted to experience the crush of people, all I had to do was walk two blocks in the other direction to the 72nd Avenue subway stop and hop a train, which I would usually take south to Battery Park and from there catch the Staten Island ferry for a round trip that cost only a dime (this was 1972). This “ocean voyage” would take me past the Statue of Liberty (in both directions) and on the way back to Manhattan, I’d feel my heart thrill at the sight of that famous skyline (which, in those days, included the World Trade Twin Towers). I was proud to be a New Yorker.

On Christmas morning, I woke up and made myself a breakfast of blueberry pancakes, fresh-squeezed orange juice, coffee, and ham and eggs. Then I opened the box of presents that had arrived from my parents, which had come several days ago, but I wouldn’t open them until Christmas morning. Later that day, I called them and talked and we all missed each other, but it was okay, I felt warm and loved inside.

In the late afternoon, I decided to get out of the apartment and go on a trip up the Hudson River, one of my favorite regions in the country. I telephoned the garage up the street where my car was kept and to let them know I was coming to get it, which they brought up from down below for me to pick up when I got there. I drove across the George Washington Bridge (thrilling, once again, at the sight of the wall of Manhattan buildings that spread out along the Hudson River) and then turned right at Fort Lee to head up north along New Jersey’s Palisades Parkway. It was dusk just about the time I got to Bear Mountain State Park, New York, right near West Point. There was thick snow all over the place and it was a perfect place to go play in the snow until it got dark. Then I was drawn to the welcoming glow of the Christmas lights decorating The Bear Mountain Inn and realized that that would a great place to have Christmas dinner. They had an IMMENSE Christmas buffet of almost every imaginable kind of food, and since I was by myself, I had no trouble getting a table without a reservation and without waiting. That was one of the most glorious meals I have ever had in whole life, even though I was by myself--the atmosphere was so loving and full of such great cheer--and I don’t think many settings could top it except, perhaps, for Christmas dinner at The Ahwahnee in Yosemite National Park, but that dinner requires a reservation at least a year ahead. Another wonderful place for Christmas dinner along these same lines is The Grove Park Inn, but it made me cry to look at that site, because that is the area where I am from and we had numerous holiday and other special occasion dinners there as a family thoroughout most of my life. The Grove Park Inn was such a major part of our life. (For example, my mother’s parents met there at a summer dance.) The Grove Park Inn was within walking distance of both sets of grandparents’ houses, and also the last house my parents had there until they moved back to California to what became their final home. I see those pictures and feel in a painful flash how many loved ones of the past two generations are now gone. We’re the ones that are left, now. And wow, even that slogan that pops up on the Grove Park Inn site, it’s as though it is speaking directly to me: “Over nine decades of history. It’s time for your story now.”

Yes it is. Yet none of us quite know right now what kind of story we want to tell.

My phone conversation with my sister was cut short. I don’t know why. We were talking and suddenly I sensed quiet on the other end of the line. I said, “Are you still there?” but everything was dead. I heard no dial tone, so figured her cell phone had drifted away somehow. I hung up, waited a while for her to call back, but she didn’t, so I tried her and only got her answering machine. I left her a message. That was half a day ago and I still haven’t heard back. Now I’m beginning to think that she had hung up on me somehow (why else hasn’t called back?). Why, what did I say? But I have experienced that the family has been very sensitive this past year. You have no idea what you will say that will set somebody off, even the most innocent thing, which is another reason why there have been so few phone calls among us. I am sure there are still too many unhealed wounds there, and, if nothing else, my sister might have been overcome by the realization that we all were stuck without any plans and Christmas is only the day after tomorrow. Mom and Dad’s passing left such a void that we don’t even know how to celebrate Christmas without them. Or maybe it was just her battery died and she had forgotten to bring her phone charger with her to the lake house.

At any rate, this looks like it could become another “New York” Christmas if I can make it one, but I’m not in New York, I’m not in an apartment that I love, and I’m not 24 years old. Life looks different from this end of the tunnel.

But I won’t be depressed, only sentimental. Is sentiment a bad thing? Some people think so--they want you to forget the past and forge ahead, bucko! Well, I'm all for forging ahead, but give me a minute, okay?

Perhaps on Christmas day I’ll take a drive into the nearby mountains. Is there snow there? Any cozy mountain lodge with a roaring fireplace and a welcoming Christmas buffet? Should I do an Internet search, or just cast my fate to the wind? Or maybe just stay home with the covers pulled on tight.

Meanwhile, I hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas, however you are able to celebrate it.

Crazies Coming Out In Force

The crazies are coming out in force so much that I can hardly stand it. If you’ve ever had the misery of living in a cockroach-infested apartment (which I suffered in New York, and then again in Los Angeles in the mid-70s, where no matter how many times I “bombed” the place to get rid of these horrendous pests, they’d simply come back from elsewhere in the building), then you’ll understand this image of going into the kitchen or bathroom, turning on the light, and seeing hordes of cockroaches scurrying away. They hide from the light, but come out in the dark.

That’s what it’s like in our society now—you see a level of insanity or ugliness that you never imagined before, but, now, you see it suddenly more and more, like cockroaches running across the wall. We must actually be in very dark times for these creatures to come out from whatever underworld they have been nesting, but some immense light-filled event must be on its way, the dawning illumination of which now reveals the presence of this vermin.

Here’s an example, a loonie in favor of “carbon rationing” stated the following: “When the chips are down, I think democracy is a less important goal then is protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.” There you go, Ecological Fascism! And Othmar Schwank, whose mother must have had a terrible speech impediment to have mouthed a name for him like that, in supporting a global carbon dioxide tax, crowed that the United States would bear the biggest burden of paying the tax, because the biggest “polluters” must pay the most. Why, exactly, is carbon dioxide, which happens to be “air” for all plant life, considered “pollution”? Well of course it isn’t, any more than oxygen is, or water.

This jolly little report came from the Canadian website I linked to above, in her piece brilliantly titled “Y2Kyoto: The Political Climate”, and it happens to have the very best “comment” section I have ever read on a blog! The people who commented there, every single one, gave me tons of hope. Normally I read people’s comments and really freak out at the drooling stupidity, such as all those people who tripped all over themselves praising Al Gore’s latest book. Amazon.com’s favorable treatment of that book coupled with their deleting strongly unfavorable reviews makes me seriously consider stopping my use of them as a book supplier. I give that company one hell of a ton of money each year, let me tell you. Even though I am not an institution, the loss of my dollars actually could hurt them. But these issues are serious enough that I can no longer stomach companies who sponsor these types of liars and their lies. What they’re really behind is the loss of our very sovereignty as a free and independent nation.

But even this level of madness is more “garden variety Naziism” compared to the people we now discover skittering across our kitchen floor. Of course there was that addle-brained girl who aborted her baby, because “the Earth just couldn’t stand any more carbon footprints.” Wow, now that’s an acolyte that Al Gore can really appreciate! She gave her only baby to his cause! While I mourn the loss of that innocent child, I guess we can be thankful that particular gene line has been stopped. But what are we to make of people who now feel that it is mankind’s philosophical duty to not have children…in fact, to not even exist at all? Somebody like author David Benatar, who actually argues in favor of a philosophy of “anti-natality”, that states that it would have been better if mankind had never been born and that we ought to be extinct. Apparently the meat of Benatar’s argument is that our never having been born is actually better for US, as well, not just for the Earth. I guess for him, “life sucks and then you die,” so let’s just skip the whole thing.

There really seems to be a trend in this direction (which I HOPE is people actually getting ready to volunteer to save the Earth in this way by offering up their own lives—I think that would be a pretty cool franchise to own), such as yet another book, this one by Alan Weisman, in which the author gleefully imagines what would happen on the Earth if mankind suddenly disappeared, due to, say, a virulent virus (which, with this flu that I have, I think I have already). Again, amazon.com’s chosen editorial reviewers may be betraying the corporation’s philosophy by, in one case saying that the book is “anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like”, and in the other case, postulating “the spectacular return of fish and bird populations, the earth might revert to Eden.”

Are these examples of an astounding hatred of mankind, or is it guilt so massive as to be implosive?

How odd that in the new environmentalist religion, the “god”, which I suppose in this case is the Earth, demands the sacrifice of the people for their sins. But the only eternal life promised by this religion is eternal life for the planet…without people.

I just might become a Catholic, after the Pope so intelligently spoke out against the whole global warming insanity. Thinking about what I said in the just-previous paragraph, I can now understand why the Pope would be against it. In fact, it would be an antithesis to him.